


Sacrificial Lambs

by tellezara



Category: Battle Royale (2000), 逆転裁判 | Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: Gen, Implied Noncon, Phoenix Wright Kink Meme, Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 20:30:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1616093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tellezara/pseuds/tellezara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Response to a Phoenix Wright kink meme prompt:<br/>Trucy is selected for the Battle Royale.</p><p>Chapter 1: From Phoenix's POV.<br/>Chapter 2: From Trucy's POV.<br/>Chapter 3: Coming soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Phoenix's POV

Three days. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand, three hundred and twenty minutes.

It might as well have been a lifetime, waiting for that long. Waiting to find out how long she had lasted. She was probably dead already, he knew. She may have even died at the very start, so gentle and unable to think the worst of anyone that the idea her classmates could murder her would be simply an alien concept. Until they gunned her down, ran her through, poisoned her, stoved her head in-

A dim awareness of pain. He looked down. The blue beanie was scrunched up tightly in his hands, his fingernails digging bloody crescents into the flesh of his palms. The tears came then. Such a soft touch. He wouldn't have lasted there either. Yet he would have changed places with her in a heartbeat. But no. They came for the children. And he couldn't do a damn thing. The military were above the law, were able to get away with what amounted to wholescale massacre of groups of children whenever the populace got a little unruly.

Trucy had begged him for permission for the school trip. He should have said no. Should have... should have... he buried his face in the beanie, that soaked up his tears. What solace did he have now? That she had remained pure of heart and had been murdered without harming a hair on anyone's head? His bitter laugh was muffled by the beanie and sounded more like a sob. He wished she could have taken a few people with her, that her death hadn't been completely pointless, even though he knew it was wrong. He refused to even entertain the idea that she might still be alive - it was the falsest hope he could ever have when there was only one winner. Trucy gave him optimism in the darkest days of his life, and she wasn't here to give him any now, to cheer him up and make him feel hopeful that she was still alive. The circularity of that reasoning was just another mire to wallow in.

He looked to his left, seeing the food Apollo had left for him and the glass of water Athena had poured from the jug. They could say nothing, change nothing, and were reduced to these gestures to show they cared about the fact they could do fuck all. His phone was buzzing repeatedly, Edgeworth's name on the caller ID screen. He would be around soon enough, would barge his way in to the Agency and see the state he was in, a throwback to the early days of his disbarment. But just like last time, there was little he could do. The military were above the law. There was nothing he could do to make them give a shit about the daughter of some two-bit attorney. Nobody gave a shit about her anymore. She was dead, and around America, there would be millions of parents thankful that their child wasn't her.


	2. Trucy's POV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened to Trucy during the Battle Royale.

TRIGGER WARNING FOR IMPLIED NONCON, SUICIDE AND DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENCE

 

Trucy cradled the shattered remains of Mr. Hat in her arms, placing them gently beneath the tree.

"Goodbye, Mr. Hat," she said softly. "I'm so sorry it ended like this."

She stood up and took a few steps back. The polished wooden face of Mr. Hat looked back at her, his expression strangely peaceful despite being partially obscured by splintered bullet holes. She couldn't cry for him, she had no tears left after all the death she'd seen that day, and it would've cheapened the value of his sacrifice. Harriet had never been interested in Trucy, she was part of the sporty group of girls in the class who had no time or care for anyone else. She had never clapped eyes on Mr. Hat before, and his sudden appearance shocked her into pointing her Kalashnikov at the new threat and opening fire.

Trucy raised her hand once more to the gash on her shoulder, the blood-soaked fabric of her glove cold and clammy against her skin. The bullet had clipped through the upper part of her shoulder, the only wound she'd received. She had been lucky. It hurt, but the pain was a raw reminder that she was still alive.

"We can't stay here any longer."

She turned to the boy who had also saved her life. He was covered in blood spatters, flies settling on him occasionally to partake in the rich feast. He stank, just like she did after nearly three days of no washing and running through the mud, undergrowth and rivers of this forsaken island, but his was a rank odour of death, the accumulated bloodshed of her classmates that caked on his skin and clotted in his hair. How many people had he killed? And why hadn't he killed her after seizing the opportunity to behead Harriet? She didn't trust him, he wasn't even from her class, he had been introduced to them as a 'transfer student', to spice up the 'game'. But her other options mostly involved dying. 

"They'll announce a new forbidden zone soon," he continued, wiping his katana with a scrap of fabric he'd ripped from Harriet's dress. He didn't seem to give a damn about the blood all over him, but he cared for the sword very seriously. "Tell me what you know."

"We're safe here for now," Trucy said. 

The boy stopped cleaning his sword for a moment. "How do you know that?"

"Because this is where we'll be for the end."

"And you say that because...?" he sounded skeptical.

"They're driving everyone together. I've been keeping track of the zones. They spiral. And this is the centre."

The boy looked at her for a moment. Then he grinned, the dried blood on his face cracking apart.

"I didn't figure you for a stupid."

"Is that why you haven't run me through with that sword?"

"No."

Trucy asked no further questions.

"I need your help," the boy said, sheathing the katana behind his back and standing up, slinging Harriet's Kalashnikov over his shoulder.

"You seem to be doing fine on your own."

"I need you to tell me how people think. I'm not so good at that."

"...How people think?"

"Yup. I know you can tell me," he regarded her with steady eyes. "Or rather, that other people can 'tell' you."

Trucy took a step back, eyes widening, opening her mouth to exclaim her surprise. The boy made a zip motion across his mouth, pointing at the collar he wore. Trucy closed her mouth and nodded.

"Let's go. We don't have long."

When Trucy realised the full scale of his plan, her heart sank.

"We can't do this," she said, placing her hand on the jerry can he was carrying. "I know it doesn't matter to you, you don't know these people, you're just here to kill for the fun of it-"

The boy wheeled around to face her.

"You think I'm doing this for fun?" he jerked the petrol can out of her hand. "You think I'm a sicko here for the kicks?"

His indignant question rang out in the clearing. Trucy looked around nervously, then was jerked forward by the boy grabbing the front of her dress. 

"If that's what I was here for, you wouldn't be alive," he said, his voice low, dangerous. 

Trucy turned her face away from his angry gaze.

"I believe in justice. So do you. So if you can't trust me, trust in that."

He shoved her back and walked off with the jerry can. She was supposed to be setting up the wires, but as she turned to do that, a little book in the dirt caught her eye. She picked it up, looking at the battered front of it, then flicked through the white pages. She started at the last page, reading it again. She pocketed it hurriedly, her heart pounding, and ran to finish the job she had been assigned. It was easy for her, she used pulley systems like this in the Wonderbar for her tricks. But this was a dirty trick, regardless of the fact that others would be responsible for setting it off. Regardless of what the boy told her about the fate awaiting her classmates at the hands of the military otherwise, she felt partly responsible by assisting him in this plan. Yet the only other thing she could do was stand by and watch him do it all, and that felt more wrong. She put her fingers against the little book in her pocket. It strengthened her resolve as she returned to where they'd agreed to meet.

An arm around her neck, from seemingly nowhere, choking her, pulling her sideways, a big burly arm covered in cuts and mud.

"Well if it ain't little Trucy-True," a voice sneered from above her. 

She recognised it straight away, from the name he'd used. Stuart Granger barely came to school but he wasn't one to miss out on a theme park trip, and he'd tripped Trucy up as she'd boarded the bus what seemed like a lifetime ago. 

"Well look who it is," Scott Railly stepped out in front of her, a slick smile on his face. "How did you manage to stay alive this long, magical girl?" Somehow, on this island, he'd managed to find somewhere to have a shower, he wasn't covered in dirt like Stuart was.

Trucy had nothing to say to them. She could read Scott like a book and knew what was about to happen to her. In the distance there was a scream, a girl's scream. Another classmate of hers dead, most probably. All of her close friends were dead already, many cut down on the first day, and just hours previously she'd almost stepped on Anna's face - Anna, who she'd spent the previous weekend shopping for prom dresses with, who would never get to wear her little red dress because somebody had buried a knife in her skull up to the hilt. She looked at Scott dully.

"Strip her," Scott ordered. "Make sure she's got no weapons hidden away."

Stuart gleefully started tearing at her clothes. He found the little book and tossed it aside. Then he checked her other pockets. He pulled out a little white disc, turning it around. There was nothing on it, but there was a circular depression in the centre.

"What's-" Stuart's voice abruptly cut out as the earplugs in Trucy's ears ballooned to fill her ear canal, triggered by Stuart putting too much pressure on the disc with his big, clumsy thumb.

It was in a world of silence that Trucy watched the blood dribble out of Scott's eyes and nose as he slowly collapsed to the floor. Stuart's arm loosened its choke hold, falling away as he too fell to the ground. The disc dropped to the ground and rolled to a stop a short distance away, next to the little book Stuart had tossed away. She picked it up, the ear plugs deflating and leaving behind a residual tinnitus as a reminder of the sonic waves that they had protected her from. She pocketed the disc again, looking at the two corpses on the ground, blood puddling on the wet soil. A twig cracked to her left and she whirled around to find the boy standing there, looking at the carnage. 

"Oh!" she gasped, clapping her hands against her chest to hide where her bra showed through her ripped dress.

He looked away.

"Sick fucks," he muttered darkly, adjusting his earplugs. "Glad I'm not dirtying my sword on them. C'mon, leave them for the birds." He shrugged off his jacket and handed it to her, to cover herself up with.

The klaxon wailed and a loudspeaker rattled off a list of numbers - students who had died. Trucy went through them mentally.

"There's five of us left," she said softly. "Five, out of seventy."

The final forbidden zones were announced, and it was as Trucy predicted - the only zone anyone could enter without the collars they wore murdering them was the one they now stood in. They went to stand in the most dangerous place possible - the very centre of the clearing. Trucy was hoping and praying that the bits of analytical psychology she'd gleaned from Athena were going to pay off. Or she and the boy would be dead.

They were sitting ducks here, even with the bullet proof vests the boy had acquired for them, and the entire situation required Trucy to use her special ability in a way she never had before. The boy lit a match and dropped it on the petrol trail he had created, it caught alight immediately and raced towards the undergrowth, consuming bushes and leaf litter. Trucy scanned the undergrowth nearby, her special vision honing in. She pointed wordlessly, and the boy span around to empty Harriet's Kalashnikov at where she'd pointed. A body slumped sideways out of the bush. A gunshot boomed, the sound echoing around the clearing, and the wooden door that comprised part of their makeshift barricade splintered and cracked as the top part of it was blown away. Trucy grimaced at the pain in her leg, pierced by shrapnel splintered, as she pivoted to look in the direction the shot had come from. There, up in a tree, the only place with a proper view of the clearing - Dinah Jones, the class' sporting star, reloading her shotgun. No wonder she'd survived this long, anyone approaching her would've been blown away.

They had no weapons with the range of Dinah's shotgun, but the extra time they'd had in this area to prepare had allowed them to plan for this. With no knowledge of which weapons the other survivors had, Trucy had needed to figure out likely avenues of attack for a variety of them. The boy pulled at one of the wires that lay on the floor of their barricade, the pulley system Trucy set up worked as well as she'd hoped and within a minute there was an explosion beneath Dinah's tree, sending the girl flying into the undergrowth that burned below.

The air was full of smoke, it was getting harder for her to see into the woodland but equally their assailants would be forced to move towards them to have the visibility to make any kind of attack. There was one person left. She saw a movement, a tiny shifting of the bush she was looking at, that was out of the ordinary. Then something arced through the air towards them-

"Grenade!" she shouted, picking up the baseball bat that was part of their weapons arsenal.

She was no home-run hitter but her anticipation of it and fear-sharpened reflexes let her get a hit on it, sending it across the clearing, then she flung herself to the floor, the boy hitting the dirt beside her as the explosion ripped through her eardrums, dry heat washing over them followed by the shockwave that brought their barricade down on top of them. Rusty corrugated iron cut deeply into her arm and she was trapped, unable to move. She groaned in pain as the corrugated iron was shoved to one side, tearing the wound open. A boy stood over her, so dirty and covered in wounds and blood that she didn't recognise him for a moment. His eyes were hard and lifeless, his expression under the mask of mud and cuts completely immobile. It was only the shock of sandy coloured hair that gave any indication of his past identity: Alex Boyes, dux of the class, quiet, hard-working, always happy to help others who were stuck. Now he stood over her with a knife, ready to kill her in cold blood.

"Alex... why?" she choked the words out. 

The smile that broke across his face was twisted, and she realised something had snapped in him, had gone wrong, and her stomach went cold, clenching in anticipation of the steel about to enter it.

"Natural selection, Trucy," he said. "The smartest and fittest survive. I have a good university waiting for me, I have a future. What do you have? Your stupid magic tricks? You don't deserve to live more than I do. So that's that."

He plunged the knife into her chest, but the tip hit the Kevlar vest she wore under the boy's jacket and glanced downwards - she thrust her hands up, slicing them apart on the blade to protect her stomach while kicking upwards with her foot into his crotch. Then he didn't have a head anymore. The warm blood sprayed across Trucy's face and into her mouth as she screamed with the pain in her hands, and Alex's headless body fell on top of her, blood flooding her eyes and trickling into her ears until it was rolled off her, the iron sheeting yanked away, and then she was being sat up, water sloshed over her face to clear the blood off. She completely fell apart at that point, the pain she was in, the fear she felt, how tired she was, the amount of death she had seen, and there was no respite from any of it because she was still alive - she couldn't take it anymore. She was a sobbing, shaking mess, vomiting Alex's blood down her front. The boy had saved her once again and he patted her awkwardly on the shoulder as she cried.

"Listen," he said. "You and me are the last ones left."

"We...We won?" Trucy's voice was hoarse.

"No," said the boy. "Not we. You. There's only one winner, remember? You're the winner, as much as you can be in this sick game. You're leaving this shithole. And thank fuck for that."

Trucy looked at him through a fog of pain and exhaustion. He held his bloodied katana by his side, and the fire raged behind him. He had a satisfied smile on his face.

"But... that means..." she struggled to get up, her legs could barely hold her, but she pulled herself together. "No... Cody, no-"

"You know my name?" he said in surprise.

It was agony to move her fingers when they were cut to the bone but she forced herself, fishing out the little book she had found, her blood leaving fingerprints on the leather surface.

"Your autograph book," she said, holding it out to him, blood dripping from her hand onto the ground. "The last page of it..." She opened it, to show him the signature.

_Thanks, Cody. You helped to deliver great justice._

_Phoenix Wright_

Cody smiled, taking the book from her.

"This book has the signatures of warriors of justice," he said. "I keep it to remind me what justice is all about."

"I would've died without you, Cody," Trucy laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. "I know what you're going to do, and I don't want you to do it. Please..." she put her other hand on his shoulder because she could barely stand up anymore, her blood soaking into his t-shirt as a wet layer upon the dried blood of her classmates.

Cody drew his katana. His face was set.

"I got sent here because I ran away from school to train in swords," he said. "This was my punishment. They want me to die like everyone else. At least I was able to save someone who deserved to be saved - reckon me and your old man are quits now. I acted with honour, so let me die with honour too. That's the only thing you can do to repay me."

"...I can't stop you, then," Trucy stepped back, tears rolling down her face once more.

Cody steadied himself, taking a breath.

"My own terms, not yours," he said aloud, to the collar microphone he wore. "So fuck you, you bastards."

The katana flashed, and he sank to his knees as he pulled the katana sideways, blood flooding forth from his stomach. Trucy put her arms around him and she caught the faint smile on his face as he slumped against her, her tears dropping into his blood-matted hair as he bled out, his fingers gripping his little autograph book.

Her collar separated, falling to the ground with Cody's autograph book, that had slipped from his lifeless fingers. She reached for the book, knowing it would surely be taken from her when the military came, and threw it as hard as she could, into the flames that raged at the edge of the clearing. It was consumed immediately. She could barely breathe through the smoke now, she could feel herself getting lightheaded. It was as she was losing consciousness that she heard a helicopter overhead. So they weren't going to leave her to die here after all. Her last feeling was that of guilt, because as the winner of nothing at all, she almost wished they would. But her last thought was that Cody's sacrifice had to mean something, so she had to stay alive, and to fight in his name.


End file.
